Baby Gap

My husband is fond of noting that you can’t tell from my CV exactly when our daughter was born. That is, there isn’t a gap or a low publication year at or near the time of her birth. I suppose he’s right, though it’s not something that impresses me.

The lack of a baby gap on my CV is more owing to luck than to anything superhuman that I did:

• I had some projects in the final writing/editing stages during times when I was somewhat to completely incapacitated before and after my daughter’s birth, and it was easy for me to move these along without being too lucid or energetic.

• Despite a difficult pregnancy, I somehow got a daughter who was healthy at birth and remarkably easy to take care of in terms of eating/sleeping etc.

• My husband helped a lot. Of course I was never far away from her for the first year, but I found ways to get things done in the few hours here and there when our daughter was sleeping or when my husband was taking care of her. Because we work in the same place, it was easy to bring her to work and share childcare.

• I was able to work out my teaching schedule so that for most of the first year I was either in a flexible team-teaching arrangement or had a light teaching load. Summer also came at a convenient time relative to my daughter’s zeroeth birthday.

I was looking through a pile of CVs recently and thinking about CV gaps in general. If you do have a gap in your CV, should you explain it, and if so, is there any good way to explain it? This could apply whether the gap resulted from a slowdown in research owing to childbirth/childcare or from taking care of a sick relative or from having health problems yourself.

A gap of a year probably doesn't require an explanation, even at a major research university. If you have buckets of publications in every year except one or two, I doubt if anyone is going to look askance at that.

But what if you don't have a huge publication record before and after a gap to help swamp the gap? I have seen some CVs with footnotes, e.g.:

Scientist, J.X., publication info blah blah blah, 2004.

Scientist, J.X., publication info blah blah blah, 2002.*

* leave of absence for birth of child

I have not seen anything similar for illness or elder care, but I suppose it could be done. Does anyone think that it is inappropriate to include such personal information on a CV? Should gaps remain unexplained? Or would it be appropriate to mention a leave of absence, but not the reason for it? And is there a better way to provide gap-explaining information than the footnote method?

As I was staring at a CV gap recently and wondering about its cause, I must admit that this was my first thought:

Scientist, J.X., publication info blah blah blah, 2008.

Scientist, J.X., publication info blah blah blah, 2002.*

* I burned out in 2002, had a string of insane and unproductive students, got some vicious reviews on grant proposals, and took a break from research to explore a latent interest in surfing and breeding small hairless dogs.

Mentoring & Money

One of the stunning findings of the NRC report on women scientists and engineers at 'critical transitions' in their careers as faculty at research universities is the effect of mentoring on the funding success rate for women:

Female assistant professors who had a mentor had a higher probability of receiving grants than those who did not have a mentor. Chemistry female assistant professors with mentors had a 95% probability of having grant funding versus 77% for those without mentors. For all six fields surveyed female assistant professors with no mentors had a 68% probability of having grant funding versus 93% of women with mentors.

Contrasts with the pattern for male assistant professors; those with no mentor had an 86% probability of having grant funding versus 83% for those with mentors.

Those are impressive and interesting numbers.

I wonder what exactly about being mentored affects funding success rate for women (but not for men).

As an assistant professor, I didn’t have an official mentor at my first university and must admit I didn’t really want one, especially considering the available options. A conversation with the department chair about mentoring went something like this:

Chair: Do you .. um.. want a .. a .. mentor? [looks at shoes]
Me: No.
Chair: OK.

By the time we had that conversation, I already had my first grant and was soon to get my second. I felt like I was doing fine without a mentor, and I wasn’t really sure what a mentor was for. I just knew that no one else in the department had ever had one and it would have felt weird to be the only one with an official mentor.

I hope that most departments now have a systematic approach to mentoring, assigning mentors to all assistant professors, and not singling anyone out.

At University #2, the topic did not arise, perhaps because I arrived with several years of experience (and funding). I had an unofficial mentor and he certainly helped me a lot, but mostly by being a great colleague. We were coPIs on a grant in my early days at University #2, though I also had other grants as sole PI or with other colleagues.

So, in terms of my experiences being mentored, it’s hard for me to think of examples of how being mentored did or might have affected my funding success rate.

As a senior professor in the capacity of a mentor rather than a mentee, I can think of a number of things I would do to help a junior colleague get funded:

• encourage them to submit a proposal that they might otherwise not write/submit owing to lack of confidence or to uncertainty about how to divide their time between the many and various responsibilities of an assistant professor;

• bring to their attention some funding opportunities that might not have occurred to them;

• facilitate collaborations with senior colleagues (including me) because these might lead to new proposals that lead to grants;

• read proposals before submission and give advice about content, style, budgets, project plans etc.;

• introduce junior colleagues to influential people at conferences (potential reviewers of proposals; funding agency program directors) or mention their names in conversations/correspondence to help increase their visibility; and

• suggest junior colleagues as possible panel members at funding agencies, so they can see how things really work at that end of the funding food chain.

Those are all possibilities (please suggest others), but why doesn’t mentoring increase the funding success rate of male assistant professors as much as it does female assistant professors?

I don’t believe that men are being discriminated against at funding agencies. The data do not support such a conclusion.

So let’s consider the issue from the mentoring end of the process, not from the funding decision end of the process:

(1) Are men mentored in a different way? Do mentors assume that the male assistant professors know more than they actually do, so help them less, so the mentoring is less effective?

and/or

(2) Are men less responsive to mentoring attempts? That is, do they get advice but tend to ignore it?

I’m not sure if either of those explains the statistics in the NRC report, but I have seen both of those phenomena in action.

My conclusions:

Female assistant professors: Don’t say no to being mentored (but make sure you get a good mentor – someone you can talk to and who is interested in helping you in a non-patronizing way).

Male assistant professors: Listen to your mentors and/or Don’t let them assume that you already know what you need to know about grant writing and funding opportunities; ask questions.

Women Faring Well

Thanks to Hope for reminding me to comment on the NRC report on women in science, engineering, and math: Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty (at major research universities). I've had a draft of a post lurking in my inbox for a while, but haven't had time to think about it sufficiently until this weekend. I also haven't read the full report ($43 for the pdf); only the synopsis.

As I'm sure many of you already know, the NRC report presents data on the % of women applying for faculty positions, being invited to interview, receiving job offers, and, once hired, receiving tenure. The key findings were:

Although women are still underrepresented in the applicant pool for faculty positions in math, science, and engineering at major research universities, those who do apply are interviewed and hired at rates equal to or higher than those for men, says a new report from the National Research Council. Similarly, women are underrepresented among those considered for tenure, but those who are considered receive tenure at the same or higher rates than men.

I attribute the equal/higher rates of women being interviewed and receiving job offers in part to the increasing number of women in applicant pools, but also in part to increased participation (in the US) of women on search committees and an increased awareness of administrators and faculty that highly qualified women applicants were previously not being given full and fair consideration. (relevant anecdote from the FSP archives)

During my travels earlier this summer, I mentioned to a colleague that it didn't surprise me that an all-male hiring committee in a department with no women faculty had recently managed to come up with an all-male interview pool (at a European university). My colleague looked at me strangely and said "But there might not have been any qualified female applicants". (relevant anecdote from the FSP archives)

Maybe, maybe not.. but the presence of women on hiring committees has been shown to be important in giving qualified women applicants fair consideration.

In any case, there are a few things that caught my eye about the NRC study:

The choice of disciplines to survey: biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, civil engineering, electrical engineering. I haven't read the full report, but I wonder if biology had significantly different data than the physical sciences, engineering, and math. The news release hints that biology was different in some ways:

..women made up 20 percent of applicants for positions in mathematics but accounted for 28 percent of those interviewed, and received 32 percent of the job offers. This was also true for tenured positions, with the exception of those in biology. [but what was the trend and magnitude of the bio-exception?]

and

In terms of funding for research, male faculty had significantly more funding than female faculty in biology; in other disciplines, the differences were not significant.

Is the latter statistic related to a difference in how NIH and NSF award grants?

And I wonder what the data would look like for some fields not surveyed, e.g. mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, materials science. Similar or different?

This statement: .. women are not applying for tenure-track jobs at research-intensive universities at the same rate that they are earning Ph.D.s, the report says.

That statistic is not surprising. People get PhDs at research-intensive universities, but not all of those people (male or female) are going to apply for tenure-track jobs at such universities. These data ignore women who apply for tenure-track jobs at small liberal arts colleges or who seek non-academic jobs as PhD-level scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. Surely there is a more relevant measure of whether women are applying for tenure-track jobs at R1 universities in unusually low numbers compared to male peers?

This part of the report disturbed me, and does not fit my definition of "women faring well" (a phrase used in the title of the news release on the report):

Tenure: In every field, women were underrepresented among candidates for tenure relative to the number of female assistant professors. In chemistry, for example, women made up 22 percent of assistant professors, but only 15 percent of the faculty being considered for tenure. Women also spent significantly longer time as assistant professors. However, women who did come up for tenure review were at least as likely as men to receive tenure.

What is happening to the women who are hired but do not come up for tenure? How many leave voluntarily, and, if leaving voluntarily, what are the major reasons? What is the definition of "significantly longer"? I guess I need to read the full report to find out the answers to these questions.

And this is kind of intriguing and not at all surprising (to me):

men appeared to have greater access to equipment needed for research and to clerical support, the report said.

I bet that many women faculty can relate to the situation in which male colleagues receive various types of clerical support but we females are expected to do these things ourselves (e.g., retrieving, filling out, submitting forms).

And, to end this list on an encouraging note:

Salary: Women full professors were paid on average 8 percent less than their male counterparts, the report says. This difference in salary did not exist in the ranks of associate and assistant professors.

Too bad for us full professors but at least our younger female colleagues will come through the system without this problem.

These reports keep on coming. Some show encouraging signs (women who come up for tenure fare as well as men), but also contain disturbing news (women are underrepresented as candidates for tenure). Best of all would be if the reports themselves generate positive action on the issues that clearly need attention.

What Do I Look Like I Do

It shouldn't surprise me anymore, but it does, when I get into a conversation with someone I don't know and they make an assumption about me based mostly on my appearance.

The latest encounter was with someone who started to explain to me in very simple terms about the physical properties of liquid nitrogen. I said, simply, "Yes, I know." The person asked "How do you know? Do you work in the office of a company that supplies liquid nitrogen tanks?"

I am certainly not insulted at being mistaken for an office worker, though I think it is a bizarre first assumption when hearing that someone is familiar with the properties of liquid nitrogen.

What about me signaled "office worker"? I was wearing shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, and casual sandals, so I clearly wasn't dressed for office work of the sort the other person imagined (though I was, in fact, dressed for going to my office).

Why not stop after "How do you know?". Or just ask, "So what do you do?", "What's your job?" etc. if you want to know if the liquid nitrogen familiarity is job-related.

In my daily life, I don't care if random people guess that I am a scientist or not, especially if I'm not wearing my special graph paper socks and shirt, but I wish that the possibility that a woman is a scientist were considered more likely than it is.

This was one minor incident, but it was one minor incident among many, and that's what I want to change.

Ergo/nomics

When I moved into my office in my current department, I was not provided with office furniture, so I rummaged around in campus and department storerooms and acquired the basic items from whatever was available. Over the years, my office furniture has not changed a lot -- some new (old) bookcases have been added, the filing cabinets have departed, and I have gone through a succession of (free!) office chairs as they have become available.

Note: My department is not typically so cheap. Everyone hired after me has nice new office furniture. I was hired as part of a 2-body deal and fell into the trap of just being 'grateful' to have gotten the second offer etc. so I was very undemanding about details like office furniture.

Because I did not set up my office furniture with much care or thought, I eventually had a few physical problems that inevitably result from spending a lot of time in one place (a chair) doing one thing (working at a computer), especially when these furniture items are not well configured.

I am of average height for a female person, but I have long had trouble (not just here) getting the desk-chair spatial relations right. With many desks, if I raise the chair enough so that my arms are in a good position for the keyboard, my feet do not reach the floor. This is not a good situation because eventually my feet go numb and later hurt. Ergo, I've come up with some partial solutions (footrests; not sitting still for so long etc.), but I have never done anything major, like getting new office furniture (which I would have to pay for myself).

But I'm thinking about it now. Do I really want to spend the next 20 years with my ergonomically not-so-great office furniture? I'm considering chucking the big old desks and just getting a slab of something to rest on something else of adjustable height. It will probably look weird, as do most ergonomically correct furniture items, but at least my feet will touch the floor and my arms will descend gracefully at the appropriate angle to the keyboard.

Either that or I should just proclaim that my office is now in the cafe down the street and just spend all my time there, typing on my laptop in various sorts of comfortable chairs.

Skin Deep

It's official: I am thick-skinned.

I have written in the past in the blog and the book about how important it is to find ways to deal with negative reviews (papers, proposals, teaching, whatever) and to develop a 'thick skin' about these things as a way to survive the constant evaluations that occur in an academic life. I feel upset and angry about negative reviews, especially if they are unfounded, mean, and stupid, but I don't let them get to me long-term.

The 'thick skin' metaphor describes a way of not being too sensitive and easily hurt. But then:

Recently I had a tetanus shot, which hurt. The nurse stuck the needle in my arm and then said "Oh no, it's not supposed to do THAT. Hmm."

WHAT? It's not supposed to do WHAT? I wondered (but didn't look).

"Oh, nothing.." the nurse replied, "It's just.. well, you must have very thick skin. You don't look like you do, but you do."

Ah ha. In fact, that's also true in a metaphoric sense. I don't look like I do, but I do.

But I've always wondered:

Is it better to appear tough (as I most definitely do not) so that people don't even try to push you around, or is it better to be tough even if you don't look like you are?

Why I Hate the iPhone

Why do I hate the iPhone when it is clearly a nifty gadget and I am otherwise completely devoted to Apple/Mac products?

I hate the iPhone for irrational reasons related to the number of times I get emails like these:

F, I know you want me to send you the text and you should have it in your hands soonish but I'm stuck sending things from my iphone.

F, I am emailing from my iphone and so there’s some new stuff I can't get to you yet.

I would have emailed you earlier. Turns out I'm actually emailing you now from my iPhone. Anyway, I'll try to prioritize getting those files in your hands. Hope you get this.

I was planning on emailing when I had more for you and I am sending this from my iphone and it might not go through. Sorry.

F, i got your email on my phone last night and I tried emailing you but I think it failed from low reception so sorry if this is a repeat email. I will try to send it later.

I can relate to having wifi access issues. There are some times/places where internet access is not ideal. Even so, for me, the iPhone has become irrevocably associated with excuses. For me, the sentence "I'm sending this from my iPhone" does not instill a sense of awe and techno-envy but instead I get a sinking feeling that I'm not going to see a certain draft or a certain figure for a while yet to come.

Please send me inspirational stories of how an iPhone changed your life for the better, got you released from prison, helped you do something you wouldn't otherwise have been able to do, and/or allowed your cat to dial 911 and save your life. I need these stories because right now, I hate the iPhone and I need help working through my iPhone issues.

Lost & Found

As my graduating students pack up and move out, they have been finding things. My things.

In some ways, I am a very organized person. Most of these ways involve getting things done and not forgetting (too often) when I have something to accomplish by a certain date. In other ways, I am not an organized person. Most of those ways involve the arrangement of my office and the things in it.

Although much of the scientific literature is available in electronic form these days, some things are not. I lend books and back issues of journals -- as well as assorted other tangible objects -- to my graduate students. And I am not good at keeping track of who has what.

Yes, I have tried check-out lists, but after the first few entries, the lists tend to sit there, unused for both check-out and return. And even if I were diligent about enforcing the sign-out/sign-in system, sometimes students borrow things when I am not around, or one student borrows something and then lends it to someone else. The lists are never accurate, so I have given up on them.

If I can't find something and I'm pretty sure it's not in my office, I just send an email around to the group and say "Does anyone have X?" and either it turns up or it doesn't.

Something interesting about the most recent finding and returning of things by my departing graduate students is that one of them had items borrowed by a student who graduated 4-5 years ago and had given the borrowed items to this other student (his housemate), telling him to give them to me. But he did not give them to me. He forgot he had these things until he graduated and started packing up his office and home. Recently I have been reunited with some very long-lost items.

I have had an unusual number of students graduate this spring/summer, so lately I have been getting a lot of books and other items returned to me. Somehow in the intervening years while these items were in other offices, the space they formerly occupied got filled in with other things, causing me to contemplate in a very serious way the possibility of considering maybe doing some major office organizing this summer.

If I do organize my office, I doubt if this effort will be accompanied by the creation of a system for organizing the lending of books etc., but at least I will be starting almost from scratch, with only a few (?) things already lent to current students and postdocs.

Loose Ends

It is in the best interests of advisers and graduate students that students graduate in a timely way and move on to another scientific (or other) adventure, but in some cases a 'timely way' means that a student leaves before completing all the things that need completing (i.e., papers). What to do?

It depends a lot on the (ex)student whether the post-graduation tying-up-of-loose-ends occurs efficiently, if at all. A common complaint of advisers is how difficult it is to get thesis-related papers completed and submitted after a student has moved on to another place or position. Here are the scenarios I have experienced:

- A student graduates with one or more unfinished papers but finishes them in a timely way and submits them. These students are exceptional and are therefore (by definition) the exception, alas.

- A student graduates with a few -- or maybe more than a few -- unfinished papers and needs to finish them (for their own career) but never seems to find the time. As adviser, I might be able to finish the papers if provided with the necessary material, but this only works if I have been closely involved in all stages of the research and if the ex-student is willing to relinquish some control over the paper(s). Lingering unfinished papers are a major problem for projects funded by an (ex)adviser's grant and cause a lot of stress for all concerned. In these cases, I need to get the papers out because I am ultimately responsible for the results of the research (grant), and my former students may also need the papers for their own career advancement, but my former students may have no time for 'old' projects now that they are working on new things.

A student graduates, leaves academia, and has no interest in writing papers. This is more clean-cut than the previous example, as it is clear that the ex-student will not be writing the paper(s), but this situation has its own challenges. For example, I am still limping along trying to finish some papers from grad students who got jobs, graduated, and left me to finish their paper(s). It is really hard to write a paper entirely for someone else, no matter how involved you were in the research. These were mostly MS students. I didn't want to delay their graduation and therefore their employment options, but there was no way the paper(s) were going to be completed before the student graduated. In some cases I have given up entirely and just let a project drop, unpublished, but in other cases I don't want to (or can't) do this.

If I refused to let my students graduate until all the essential papers were submitted, it would add years to the graduate program for some of them and they would run out of funding. I don't think that is a good option for anyone, no matter how many problems it causes for me, as adviser, as I tie up loose ends and try to get thesis-related papers finished and submitted.

If a student is out of funding and/or has a post-graduation job offer, they should leave as soon as they have completed a thesis that is deemed acceptable for the degree. Ideally, the thesis will consist of published and/or submitted manuscripts, but it is rare for the entire thesis to have reached this stage by the time a student departs.

This post probably sounds like a complaint -- and it sort of is -- but I also accept that this is just the way things are going to be with some (many) students and I need to find the best way to deal with it. I will still continue to encourage my students to graduate in a timely way, but I also hope I can find better ways to get manuscripts completed and submitted even when the students don't or can't help much with this.

She's Just Not That Into Her Job

Earlier this summer I spoke with a colleague who mentioned in passing that a technician who was helping him when he visited another institution seemed a bit resentful about helping him, or at least was not as cheerful as she could have been about helping him.

I said: Think about how she feels. She has a PhD, did a postdoc, wrote some high profile papers, but then took a technician job at the institution where her husband is a big professor. She's good enough to have been a professor in her own right, but instead she spends her days helping others do their research, with no hope of advancing in her career.

My colleague looked puzzled. He said: She has nothing to complain about. She has a job and she and her husband live in the same place.

Then I realized: My colleague and his wife live several hours apart owing to complicated job/family issues. His wife is not an academic, but it still has not been possible for them to live in the same place for the past few years. He was thinking of the situation from the point of view of 'how lucky this couple is to be together in the same location'.

But then I thought: He should understand the technician's unhappiness (if I am correct about the reason for her job dissatisfaction). The reason my colleague and his wife live apart is because each of them would be unhappy if they gave up their present job and look a less desirable job in their spouse's current city of residence.

Perhaps living apart is so difficult that his instinctive reaction involves his wish to live in the same place as his wife, rather than first considering the reality of what that would involve if his wife quit her job, moved to his city, and took a job she didn't like. I am sure he is well aware of that, but his longing to have his family together dominates his feelings and point of view.

My husband and I lived apart for years while we were trying to find jobs we both wanted in the same or proximal location(s). We are lucky that it worked out for us and we never had to face the long-term implications of one of us making a sacrifice in career aspirations. However, perhaps it is because I confronted, at least hypothetically, the wrenching possibility of having to take a job I didn't want while my husband pursued his dream job that I projected a particular explanation for the spouse/technician's job dissatisfaction. [Note: I know from personal experience and other reports that she is in fact dissatisfied with her job, so I am not jumping to conclusions about that, at least].

I hope things work out for my colleague, but I also hope he will have some sympathy for this smart and talented scientist who chose family over career. She may well have made the best decision for herself and her family, but it can't be an easy thing to do.

Proposed Ethical Lapse

These difficult economic times have resulted in many necessary cost-saving measures and cuts. These difficult economic times have also resulted in some unnecessary measures and cuts that do not save anyone any money. Examples of each:

• Freezing faculty salaries (and hiring) saves a university money.

• Freezing postdoctoral salaries (and hiring) does not save the university money if the postdocs are entirely paid from external sources of funding.

In fact, universities benefit financially from postdoctoral scholars because postdoctoral salaries may be part of the indirect cost calculation of a grant. Postdocs in the sciences bring money to a university. Freezing salaries of postdocs or other soft-money researchers is a money losing policy.

Perhaps administrators aren't aware of this? Perhaps they are aware but it's too difficult to make different policies for different job categories? Perhaps they are concerned about fairness? That is, why should one group of employees get a raise when others are experiencing salary freezes or cuts?

I know that faculty at various institutions have written letters to the powers-that-be about restrictive postdoctoral hiring/salary policies, with only limited success at overturning the policy or being granted exemptions.

I can't think of a good reason why grant-funded salaries can't be paid as budgeted in the grants. If the money exists in a grant for the specific purpose of paying a researcher, the researcher should get the budgeted money no matter what the university policy is regarding hiring/pay for faculty or staff.

Some of my colleagues have been trying to find ways to get around the salary freeze so they can pay their postdocs (or themselves) the amounts budgeted in grants. Here are some of the possibilities that I have heard discussed:

1. Writing and back-dating a letter promising a specific raise in an official letter to a postdoc. Although the salary for the first year is always mentioned in an offer letter/hiring contract, in some cases the salary for subsequent years is not. The proposed back-dated letter is an attempt to get around the lack of a specific letter for the second or subsequent years. If a pre-economic-crisis letter exists and spells out the salary/raise for subsequent years, the university has to honor this.

2. Finding a way to get the raise money to its intended recipient in a non-salary kind of way, e.g. buying an awesome personal computer of equivalent cost as the unpayable raise. Computer purchases can easily be justified on most grants. This isn't as good as a real raise, but it's better than nothing.

Back-dating a letter clearly isn't ethical, and I suppose spending grant money on something that wasn't originally budgeted and that might not directly impact the research isn't ethical either, but can these ethical lapses be forgiven because they are done for a good cause? Are the lapses justifiable because they are done to counteract a misguided policy, or should we follow the rules, however stupid they are?

If we can't spend the budgeted money on salary, we either have to spend the money on something else (something we are told at ethics training workshops is not allowed) or we have to give the money back to the funding agency at the expiration of the grant. Perhaps we can prolong our grants with no-cost extensions until the no-raise policy is lifted and eventually give our postdocs the budgeted raise, assuming the postdocs haven't moved on to another job.

I have recently considered another not-so-ethical route to take so that I can give a raise to a postdoc. The raise is in the grant budget, was justified in the grant proposal, and the postdoc deserves the raise. I made a request to the Dean that I be allowed to give the postdoc the budgeted raise, and my request was denied. So I started thinking of ways I could somehow get the raise to the postdoc anyway.

I could perhaps be talked out of my unethical idea by persuasive comments to this post, but at the moment this idea seems kind of appealing to me. Consider:

One of the only ways to be granted an official exemption to the no-raise policy is if the person in question has another job offer. The job offer doesn't have to be carved in stone -- it can just be an email from someone at another institution expressing an intention to offer a position. I don't want my postdoc to go out and get a real job offer (and he has said he wants to stay on here as a postdoc for another year or two), but I am pretty sure that I could get a colleague at another institution to send my postdoc an email expressing an interest in hiring him away from my institution (but without any real intention of doing so). With such a letter in hand, there's a good chance I could get the raise approved.

Ethical? No.. Should I do it anyway? Is there another, better way?

This is My Brain on Vacation

When I am on a family trip, roaming around with my daughter ± spouse on a vacation-type experience, I still spend a fair amount of time thinking about work. This is not a problem -- I enjoy thinking about my research while I'm off doing something else. And I can't imagine turning off that part of my brain just because I'm on vacation.

While on vacation last week, I

• thought about existing and proposed research
• did some writing/editing of my own manuscripts and proposals
  
• did some editing/reviewing of other people's manuscripts
• did some professional service obligations that had to be done by a certain date
  
• stayed in contact with students/postdocs when they wrote to me with questions or requests
• visited with a former PhD student and discussed future research we might do together

These work-related activities did not dominate my vacation, but they occurred, woven into the vacation time. I also spent long days having family adventures exploring, chatting, laughing, reading, writing, photographing, eating. My daughter asked me to teach her Latin, so I got an introductory book and we started working through it together a little bit each day.

Perhaps this will help her in her future career: she has decided to be a psychologist when she grows up, and she says that she will specialize either in horses or graduate students.

In any case, a comment on yesterday's work/vacation-related post made me wonder:

If I were to get bad news about a proposal or manuscript, would I prefer to get this news while on vacation or while at work?

The most accurate answer is of course 'neither', but if I had to choose, I might choose vacation. I don't think bad news (a.k.a. rejection) would destroy my vacation and it might actually be good to have some distance from work and an opportunity for pleasant distraction when dealing with severe disappointment about a work-related issue.

An ideal vacation for me is one that involves roaming around an interesting place, seeing and learning new things and having fun and, from time to time, thinking about my research and my students and other professional activities and getting a bit of work done here and there as time and mood allow.

Texting the News

During my recent travels, I had limited internet access. I have trouble breathing and feel a bit faint if separated from the internet for too long, and this sporadic internet access was particularly difficult for me because I was waiting to hear news of a proposal. Whenever I did have internet access, I quickly scanned my inbox hoping for (good) news about the proposal. I last checked my email at the equivalent of about 1:30 pm on a Friday in the program officer's city. Nothing.

Later that night, after I'd turned out the light to try to sleep, my phone vibrated with a text message from my co-PI: "xx funded!". My daughter woke up, I told her the news, and she offered to roam the city with me looking for an internet connection so I could get more information. This was kind of her, and I was briefly tempted, but I decided that would be a bit too insane.

I replied to my co-PI and sent a text message to the postdoc whose funding depended on that grant.

I was very happy and relieved. Even so, I had anxious dreams that night:

- Maybe I had misunderstood the text message? The 'xx' in the text message was a 2-letter abbreviation that had seemed unambiguous when I first read it, but what if my co-PI meant something else?

- Did "funded" really mean "funded" or was it a "I hope this proposal will be funded" kind of message?

- Would the budget be cut substantially? What if the email from the program director actually said "I am going to fund the research except for the postdoc." I had already texted my postdoc with the great news. What if that was premature?

And so on. I am not an extraordinarily anxious person under normal circumstances, but I was very worried about this proposal for various complex reasons that had nothing to do with the intrinsic merit of the research proposed.

I also thought that this proposal was one of the 2-3 best proposals I had ever written. If it had been turned down in this year of supposedly abundant $$ for research, I would have been more devastated than usual at the rejection of a proposal.

Proposal anxiety certainly did not ruin my family vacation, but it was always there at a low to moderate level, not far from my mind, with occasional spikes of more intense anxiety.

Checking email the next day confirmed that the proposal really will be funded at close to the requested level. Now I know that the grant really will exist, the postdoc funding is intact, and all is right with the world. And now I have a new idea for another proposal.

Off the Grid

My professional trip has now merged with a family trip. Internet access is still sporadic (I am typing this in a park using a non-password protected signal from a nearby apartment), so I am going off-line for a few days, or maybe the rest of the week.

Graffiti

I am on the road (hence the random comment moderation and short posts). Somehow I thought internet access would be continuous, but I have been forced to go to great lengths and expense to get occasional access. Next week might be better. Or not. In the meantime, the photo shows some graffiti I saw today.

Professor Dreams

What do professors dream about? One of my colleagues had a strange dream recently: one of his graduate students was in prison.

Was this a bad dream? In fact, it apparently was not.

Both my colleague and his student, who was imprisoned for unknown reasons, were happy (in the dream). The advisor was happy because the student had access in prison to everything he needed to do his research, and the student was happy because he would have something to do while in prison.

It is probably not a coincidence that this colleague has recently had trouble getting one or more of his graduate students to focus and complete some projects.

Exploratory Research

Early in my career, I had an "exploratory" grant that, although not large in $$, turned out to have an immense impact on my career because it allowed me to start a new project involving completely new research. I don't think I would have been funded by a standard grant for this research. I had no track record in this type of research, and would likely have been sliced and diced in review. A kind and optimistic program officer, however, gave me a chance.

I later went on to get standard grants for related research, published ~ 20 papers on the original study and research that branched off from it, and am now well established in this field.

Although that exploratory grant was successful, I have not sought to obtain other such grants. Lately, though, I have been thinking about making another attempt. Exploratory grants can be extremely important for early-career researchers, but can also be important for mid-career researchers who want to "explore" something new or a bit risky; i.e., research that may involve dangerous ideas.

NSF has long had programs for funding exploratory research. In its latest incarnation, one program has the annoying name EAGER, as in EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research. I think NSF's acronym-makers maybe should have kept working on that one.

EAGER grants are a way to fund exploratory research that is of course transformative (as are all NSF-funded projects) but that also could be designated as "high risk". The concept of "high risk" is still a bit murky to me, but NSF includes these items as possible elements of "high risk - high payoff" research:

- radically different approaches
- new expertise
- novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives

All of the items in this list could be appropriate for a standard proposal, but EAGER-funded research must be of the sort that would not be appropriate for a standard proposal.

It may well be, then, that "high risk" actually means "high risk of rejection by standard review processes". This is a very real risk for some research (and/or some PIs), so it is important that NSF has these programs, not because they circumvent peer- and panel-review, but because there should be a mechanism by which program officers can identify and fund intriguing ideas.

So why I am I contemplating "exploratory" funding possibilities now? An idea that some colleagues and I are working on would be rejected in a typical peer-review process; we know this for a fact. So maybe it shouldn't be funded for the various reasons that the reviewers mentioned? Maybe. Or maybe, as I prefer to believe, the reviewers were short-sighted.

I do not envy program officers who have to sort out things like this. Is this person proposing a crazy idea that shouldn't be funded or is it in fact a visionary approach involving awesomely transformative research?

I don't know, but I hope I get the chance to find out.

Summer Reading

Way back when, nearly 3 years ago, one of my first (perhaps even the very first) poll I did as FSP was to find out the favorite academic novels of my readers, who at that time numbered few.

Despite the low voter turn-out, the majority vote-getter was also my personal favorite, Straight Man. I was thinking about Straight Man the other day as I walked across campus with a colleague and I used the phrase "a goose a day", a literary allusion instantly recognizable by other SM fans such as my colleague.

Although not on my original list, another favorite of mine is White Noise (DeLillo), which is only partly an academic novel. I suppose this means I tend toward the absurdist sub-genre of academic novels.

I found this old (2000) list online when searching with the keywords "academic novels". There are 42 novels in the main part of the list. Another long list is here, and it's interesting to examine the differences in the lists (e.g. one contains Bellow, one does not). A recent but shorter list is here, but this includes some novels that I personally would not classify as academic novels.

In my professor-centric world, an academic novel is about faculty ± administrators and not "a chronicle of college sports, fraternities, drinking, coeds, and sex" (I am Charlotte Simmons, T Wolfe; a novel I read and kind of loathed). Those types of novels need another name, e.g. collegiate novel, or something like that.

I was thinking about the general topic of academic novels because I was looking for some books to read and was looking through the lists in the links above. And then I wondered: Why do I want to read an academic novel during the summer? Why do I want to read an academic novel at all? What is it that I like about (some of) them?

I don't know why I like (certain) academic novels so much. In general, my reading preferences tend toward international literary fiction, so in most other respects I am not inclined to 'read about myself' in my leisure reading. There is something very satisfying, however, about reading a really good parody of a faculty meeting or faculty-administrator interactions, even in the summer.

Instead of a poll today, I have a general question related to academic novels:

If you are an academic, do you like this genre of novel or is academia the last thing you want to read about in your leisure reading? Can academic readers be classified according to whether they love a scary-funny parody of a faculty meeting or whether reading about faculty meetings (however fictionalized) is a kind of torture?

Dining el desco Data

The results of Friday's poll about how often people eat lunch at their desk are very surprising to me. Who knew that so many people ate lunch at their desk every day or, if not every day, very often (1-2 times/week)? I certainly did not know there were so many.

I showed the results of the poll to a European colleague, and he said "That must be an American thing."

I suppose that the decision about where and how to dine is in part related to priorities about how work vs. personal time is spent. I would rather spend some time working in the evening or on a weekend than eat lunch at my desk, but I can see how others might prefer to be efficient with lunch time on weekdays and use this time to get caught up, talk to students, and so on.

During the week, I spend so much time talking to scheduled and unscheduled visitors to my office, I like having a bit of time away from that. When not attending a lunchtime seminar or meeting or teaching a class over that time period, I use lunch time to eat and chat with my husband or a friend or colleague about various topics of the day/week. For me, lunchtime, however brief, is a needed break in a busy day.

This topic reminds me of an incident in days of yore when I taught at a small liberal arts college, when I used to eat lunch every day with a particular colleague. We sat in a somewhat secluded common area of the department building and chatted about work and life and so on. Once some of our students realized that it was our habit to eat lunch in that particular place each day, they started stopping by to chat. I didn't mind this at all when the students wanted to stop by and have a conversation about something.

One particular student, however, liked to come by and use the time as an extra office hour and/our counseling session, and no amount of saying "Could we talk about this during office hours" could convince her that we weren't thrilled to share our lunch time with her and her problems. One day, this student told us in great detail about her complex relationship with her boyfriend. My colleague had just taken a large bite of his sandwich (he was hurrying through lunch so he could retreat to the relative safety of his office), when the student said "It must be so special for you to have students talk to you about these things". When she said that, my colleague spit out his sandwich in shock, so great was his surprise at the difference between his view and the student's view of the specialness of these lunchtime interactions. He did not stay long in the small liberal arts college world. I wonder where he eats lunch at his current institution; probably in a locked room or a faculty center.

In any case, I learned something from the poll, and I am still contemplating getting a large sign that signals my unavailability for visitors when I am eating lunch at my desk.

[note: comment moderation might be a little more sporadic than usual for a few days]

Eating al desco

As happens from time to time, even in summer, I was recently eating lunch 'al desco'. While I was eating-working, a student walked in my office to ask me a question, saw I was eating lunch at my desk, and said "Oh, I'm so sorry for interrupting your lunch. I'll come back later."

I was stunned. This has never happened to me before. In my experience, no student has ever before acknowledged that eating lunch @ one's desk means one is busy and therefore perhaps non-urgent questions can wait until another time.

I already had a very high opinion of this student, but he shot up even higher in my estimation after this incident.

Alas, his polite response to seeing me eating @ my desk makes him a rare beast indeed.

Memo to visitors: If you walk into someone's office and see them eating lunch at their desk, this probably means they are busy. If you aren't sure and ask "Are you busy?", this is more polite than not asking, but this question, however well intentioned, might elicit a glare, an incredulous laugh, sarcasm, or insincerity (just so you know).

I certainly can't speak for all professors -- perhaps there are some who so love their desks and offices (and office chairs!) that eating@desk is a pleasurable activity that is done by choice and that has the added benefit of attracting cute little rodents (and insects!) -- but I typically eat at my desk if I am so busy that my only other option is to skip lunch.

Lunch-skipping occurs now and then too, but it is not a good idea if I am teaching an afternoon class, and dangerous if I have an afternoon faculty meeting.

Yes, I know that I could close my door. I have tried that, but then people knock and I either have to get up and go to the door to tell the visitor(s) that I am busy, pretend that I am not there even though it might be obvious that I am (causing emotional trauma to some, as I have learned from experience), or yell Go Away I Am Busy.

I once tried a Do Not Disturb sign, but some people didn't see it and knocked anyway, some saw it but wanted to know why I didn't want to be disturbed, and others told me later they thought I was probably taking a nap in my office. So maybe I need a Do Not Disturb Because I Am Really Really Busy Right Now and No I Am Not Sleeping sign.

I find all of these options less appealing and more time-consuming than having someone step into my office, ascertain that I am busy, and go on their way until another time when I am not in simultaneous mid-chew and mid-something-else.

None of this is a big deal, of course, and it doesn't punch a hole in my day if I encounter someone who starts talking to me without even asking if this is a good time to interrupt, but when I encountered a real live polite person this week, I realized how nice it was to have such an experience for a change.

That said, it's time for a poll:

How often do you eat lunch at your desk?
	Never
	Sometimes (1-2 times per term or year)
	Somewhat often (1-2 times per month)
	Often (1-2 times per week)
	Every day
pollcode.com free polls

h-Degrees

The issue of honorary degrees became a rather hot topic this year in large part owing to Arizona State University's decision that Obama hadn't yet earned such an immense honor. It was not difficult to expose the hypocrisy of that decision by glancing at a list of previous ASU h-degree awardees.

In any case, some universities award honorary degrees and some do not. I have been occasionally aware of the general issue of honorary degrees when controversy arose at some university or another owing to the awarding of a degree to a controversial person (e.g. Oxford/Thatcher/1985; Yale/Bush/2001) or non-person (some school in the 1990's/Kermit the Frog) or owing to the rescission of an honorary degree to someone (e.g. Robert Mugabe) who may have besmirched the reputation of the awarding university after the awarding of the degree.

I was recently somewhat unwillingly involved in one stage of the selection process for honorary degrees at a particular university. Back in the days when I was completely -- rather than just mostly -- ignorant of the inner workings of the h-degree decision process, I'd have guessed that some BigName famous people who had done amazing things were routinely given these degrees by various universities around the world just as a way of saying "Our university community thinks you are great", even if the honoree didn't have any particular reason to care about that particular university. Mandela. Havel. Saramago. Hockney.

And I probably could also, if pressed, have guessed that some NotSoBigName people got these degrees as well, for being great at whatever it is they do, even if their names are not known to most people. Such persons might include the CEO of a successful but not galactically famous company, the inventor of a gizmo we cannot live without, the tireless proponent of a worthy cause, an artist of some-but-not-cosmic repute, the Secretary of Agriculture in the Ford Administration. Maybe these people would have an association with the awarding university, maybe they wouldn't.

In a cynical moment, I might also have predicted that some BigNames got them just for being famous. Queen Elizabeth comes to mind.

In another cynical moment, I might wonder if some BigDonors to a university might get such degrees as thanks for sharing their loot with the university, or at least with the athletic department ± a new biomed building or two, but that would be unworthy.

One category of potential awardee that has surprised me is the awarding of an honorary degree to someone who already has a PhD from the university that is considering giving them an honorary doctorate. What is the point of that? Don't most universities have Awesome Alumni/ae awards they could give out instead of an honorary degree to someone who already has a PhD from the same place? I can see giving an honorary degree to someone who has an undergrad or MS degree from the university, so maybe it's not so different to give someone an honorary degree even if they have a PhD from the university. Maybe not, but it still seems strange to me.

Maybe it would be less strange if the honorary degree were given for something unrelated to the PhD field; e.g. someone with a PhD in comparative literature who achieves greatness for work as a human rights campaigner.

In another situation with which I am familiar, a scientist was nominated for an h-degree on the basis of his semi-illustrious career in science. The nomination packet contained the scientist's Web of Science citation report, including his h-index. I wonder what the minimum h-index is for getting an h-degree.

Co-authorial Rights

Something caught my eye in a recent NYT article about a supposedly falsified biomed study in which the first author forged the signatures of co-authors whom he selected without informing them about the study or their co-authorship. When problems with the (published) paper were revealed and the co-authors realized they were co-authors on a paper they had never seen, involving research they had not done, at least one of them tried to gain access to the reviews of the manuscript and other editorial correspondence with the first author. He was denied access.

This is from the article, with additional info added by me in brackets:

Dr. Andersen [one of the co-authors who didn't know he was a co-author until the paper was published], curious about what Dr. Kuklo [the first author] had actually submitted, asked Dr. Heckman [a journal editor] for copies of those reviews. But the editor turned him down, even though Dr. Andersen was supposedly one of the study’s authors. In a recent interview, Dr. Heckman said that his journal, like many others, considered such reviews confidential and shared them only with a study’s lead author.

“It is all confidential information,” Dr. Heckman said, when asked by a reporter for the reviews. “It is protected by the peer-review process.”

I can see why a random person couldn't write to a journal editor and request to see so-and-so's reviews, but why is this information confidential with respect to co-authors?

This general issue reminded me of a conversation I had at a conference last spring with a colleague. He hates the fact that he almost never gets to see the reviews and editor comments for manuscripts to which he has contributed as a co-author. Some of his first-author colleagues won't send him the reviews even when he asks. He had never tried asking an editor if he could see the reviews as well, but perhaps it wouldn't have mattered.

Is Dr. Heckman right? I am not sure he is, but if he is, why can't co-authors see review materials? If co-authors are responsible for the content of papers, shouldn't they have the right to see the reviews?

In a few instances, I (in my role as first author) have not wanted to share review and editorial correspondence with co-authors, for reasons I will outline below, but if any of these co-authors had asked me directly if they could see the reviews, I would have complied with their request. And if a journal had a policy of giving co-authors access to reviews, I would not object.

The exceptions I can think of at the moment occurred when:

(1) the co-author was a somewhat junior student and the reviews were 'not constructive' (= hostile and unprofessional, possibly including insulting comments). Eventually students should see reviews in their raw form and learn how to deal with negative comments displaying various magnitudes of rudeness; I expect senior grad students to participate fully in reading and responding to reviews. However, I have seen the crippling effects of harsh first-reviews on students, and would prefer to ease them into the experience of being attacked for no obvious good reason.

(2) I hated my co-author. I can think of one case in which I ended up not having much choice but to co-author a paper with someone who was not only hated by me but by most of the rest of the world. My other option was not submitting the manuscript, but I had a lot of time and effort (and $$) invested in this project and was unwilling to drop it without at least attempting to publish one paper. Communicating with my odious co-author about anything, however benign a topic, tended to unleash paranoid rantings about all the people he hated (they were wrong about everything, he was right), and I didn't want to know what his response would be to reviewer comments, even though they were mostly mild and constructive. I took care of all the revisions myself and presented the finished manuscript to him as a fait accompli.

Despite my aberrant and hypocritical behavior in these cases, my general opinion is that co-authors have a right to see reviews and be fully informed of the review process and editor decisions.

I realize that some manuscripts have 57 authors and it might not be practical to involve everyone, but perhaps in these cases the corresponding author could indicate the 5 or 10 co-authors who should have access, if they so choose, to information related to the review process.

Or am I missing something? Is there a downside to allowing some or all co-authors to have access to reviews?

Except One (2009 edition)

Last June I wrote about how every student but one in my medium-sized course for science majors gave me a positive evaluation for my teaching. What I wrote last year applies to this year as well for another medium-sized course for science majors that I taught this past term. Last year I wrote:

In the evaluations for my class this time, every student except one said that they learned a lot. Every student except one said they would recommend my class to others. Every student except one said that they would recommend me as an instructor. Every student except one said that I treated students with respect, was approachable, gave timely feedback, was organized, and so on.

But here's the difference between last year and this. Last year I wrote:

I know which student hated the class. This student was unremittingly rude throughout the entire academic year.

and I asked the question:

Is it better to know in advance that at least one student hates your class, or is it better if you don't know until you read your evaluations?

I now have more data to answer this question. This year, I have no idea who the exception is. I was shocked that one student hated me and the class so much and I was completely unaware of this until I read my evaluations.

I would understand it more if this were my big intro course with hundreds of students. In a big intro course, it's not unusual to have a few students who check off all the most negative ratings on an evaluation. In my big class this past term, I was surprised that I only got one extremely negative comment (maybe one of the cheaters I busted? the student I caught lying about needing to miss a quiz for an athletic event? someone else entirely?) and one moderately negative evaluation (from someone who hated the fact that when I was asked a question by email, I typically explained how and where to find the information rather than just giving the answer directly). I expect those sorts of evaluations in a big class, and as long as there are only a few of them, I don't worry about it.

In a small to medium-sized course where you know all the students by name and see them around the department all the time and chat in the halls etc., it's troubling to find out that one of them was extremely unhappy throughout the course and never said a word despite having ample opportunity. The one unhappy student wrote no specific comments to explain what exactly he or she hated about me and the course, but checked off all the most negative ratings on the multiple choice part of the form.

So, is it better to know in advance that at least one student hates your class, or is it better if you don't know until you read your evaluations?

Both are lousy situations, of course, but I guess overall I'd have to say that I prefer the latter. I feel great regret that I didn't know one of my students was so unhappy with the course and there was no time to discuss the problem, but I enjoyed teaching this class this term, thinking (delusionally, as it turns out) that all of the students were also enjoying the class.

Last year, the one extremely hostile and vocal student had a serious negative effect on the the class and my feelings about teaching it. Each day of the course last year, I dreaded going into the classroom and seeing that student sitting there, arms crossed and frowning, in the back of the room, preparing to whine about something. The rest of the class was intimidated by this student and the atmosphere of the entire course was affected.

This year, the class seemed cheerful and filled with motivated, perky students who were very interactive about asking and answering questions during the class. It was a pleasure to teach that group of students.

So I lost one student along the way and I am sorry about that, but if you forced me to choose between the two unappealing options, I would choose the unknown hostile student over the in-my-face hostile student.

They Heart Powerpoint

We have all seen horrific examples of presentation software abuse, I am sure, but I don't think there is anything inherently evil about presentation software. I think that if used with care and thought, it can be a force for good (learning).

Consider these comments from my teaching evaluations from students who took my Huge Intro Science Class this past term:

Created great presentations
Had a well prepared powerpoint
Her powerpoints were great
Power point worked well!
Presented the material clearly through the slides
Provided great visuals.
Really great powerpoints
She had great powerpoints
She had really great powerpoints
She had very well written powerpoints
her powerpoints helped me learn a lot.
She used power points that were easy to take notes from
She used powerpoints during lecture
Spoke effectively and used powerpoints
The Power Point slides were very easy to follow
The Powerpoint presentations were very well done
The power points were very helpful
The prepared slides were really helpful
The slides were great.
great visual aids

Etc.. you get the picture that they liked the pictures. Those comments were not prompted by any sort of directed question, but were part of the general comments section of the course evaluation.

I was pretty sure that the course had gone well overall, but I was stunned by the overwhelming positive comments about the presentations. I have taught this course many times but I have never gotten comments like these on the presentation aspect of the class. What was different this time?

Although I have taught this course many times, I don't teach it so often that I can just walk into the lecture hall and automatically emit coherent words of great wisdom. I also change the course a bit each time in terms of materials and emphasis and examples. The re-thinking that I do before every class to make sure that I have a good idea of what I want to say and how I want to say it is accompanied by tinkering with the visual aids (The Powerpoints).

This past term I did in fact spend a lot of time working on the presentation part of the class. I think the presentations are good, but I don't think there is anything extraordinary about them, despite the raves in the evaluations. I think that what mostly improved was how I used The Powerpoints.

Or, at least, I like to think that it wasn't The Powerpoints alone that the students found useful. I don't use text slides (I write on the board and talk as I go along) and I used the images as one component of the class. My hope is that the students found the combination of teaching methods effective, and not just The Powerpoints -- that is, the images and what I said and how I said it and the pace that I went and the amount of material I covered in a certain combination of depth : breadth and the jokes that I told and maybe also the interpretive dances that I did on the table at the front of the room.

FSP to FSP

Something that I find very funny but kind of bizarre is when someone sends me a link to FSP or a copy of a post or even part of The FSP Book with a note saying that I might find this relevant, interesting, or funny. Fortunately for me, so far the sending of FSP to FSP has been accompanied by a nice comment and not "Look at the garbage written by this raving moron"... or worse.

In most cases the emailed FSP has been sent to me somewhat indirectly -- e.g., from person to person and eventually to me, or to me as part of a group email.

In all but one of these cases the person forwarding (or re-re-re-forwarding) FSP to FSP was not someone I knew well, but in one case I was truly shocked. How could this person not know that I wrote the thing he was sending to me?

I have assumed that anyone reading FSP who didn't know in advance that this was me would immediately figure it out, but this does not always seem to be the case. Do I sound different as FSP than I do as me?

Apparently so, but I am quite confident that 2/3 of my cats would recognize me (and themselves) if they read this blog.

There are some bloggers who used to be anonymous but who now are not, and it has fascinated me that their non-anonymous blogging voice is different from their anonymous blogging voice -- not just the topics, but the writing style and tone. Perhaps it is this way with me, though I haven't yet run the experiment of non-anonymous blogging to test the idea.

I checked with the FSP Editorial Board about this issue. I asked whether I sound different as FSP and whether my FSP 'voice' is inconsistent in any way with me in real life. The answer is no, FSP sounds exactly like me.

Another possibility for why I have escaped detection by readers who do in fact know me in real life is that people who know me just can't imagine that I -- a middle-aged science professor -- am a blogger. I am kind of entertained by that.

And no, it doesn't bother me that people who download The FSP Book send copies along to others. Even though this might deprive me of minor profits that would otherwise be used to support my cats' catnip habits, I consider sharing e-versions of FSP The Book to be like lending a book you like to a friend. It's not as if it's a pirated song or a DVD.. and I wrote the book for people to read and use and discuss, and, apparently, to send back to me to (re)read.

Mother Figure

At the end of the final exam for my Large Science Class, most students silently placed their completed exam on the front table with varying degrees of force -- some tentative, some emphatic. Some students smiled and said goodbye, a few even said thanks.

One student left without smiling or saying anything or even looking at me, and I was a little surprised because I had helped that student a lot during the term. She had been failing and I worked out a plan with her to keep her on track, and she ended up doing much better as the term progressed. She had feared she would not graduate because she was failing this course, but unless she completely blew the final exam, she would pass the course and she would graduate. I hoped her lack of eye contact during exam turn-in didn't mean that she had failed (or thought she had failed) the exam.

A few minutes later, though, she came rushing back in and came up to me and said "I forgot to say goodbye because I was so distracted but I wanted to thank you" and then she gave me a quick hug.

I have never been hugged by a student before and it was kind of weird. I told my husband about it later and he said "You have finally gotten old enough that you seem like a mother to them".

I had to think about this for a while. This was a new concept for me even though I am quite aware that I am old enough to be the mother of an undergraduate. I think that I am having trouble getting used to the idea not because the old-enough-to-be-their-mother thing freaks me out but because I do not feel maternal towards my students.

Alternatively, the hugging incident could have been a random event involving a student who likes to hug people.

Let's assume that my husband is right (this time) with the Mother Hypothesis.

Is being a motherly professor a good thing?

I used to think it wasn't. Early in my teaching career when I taught an enormous class in a giant auditorium, I imitated a technique that one of my teaching mentors, a male professor, had used very effectively to quiet a large class down so he could start teaching: I said "Sssshhhh". When he did this, the students quieted down and he started class. I saw him do it at the beginning of almost every class.

It wasn't quite as effective for me, but I didn't think anything of it until I got my teaching evaluations at the end of the term. A number of students commented that they found this Ssshhhing "offensive" and "insulting", as if I were a "kindergarten teacher" or " a mom".

I asked the person from whom I had borrowed this technique whether this was a problem for him. He was very surprised. Not a single student had ever commented on this to him before, not in evaluations, not in person, not ever. It was not a problem, not even an issue.

When a male professor said Sssshhhh, the students saw and heard a professor who wanted them to be quiet so he could teach them things. When a female professor said Sssshhhh, the students saw and heard a kindergarten teacher or (horrors) a mom who was treating them like disobedient children.

I never Sssshhhhed a class again, and I have worked very hard over the years to erase the preconceived idea that female professors aren't real professors or somehow lack that professorial je ne sais quoi that male professors have.

But now that I am middle aged, maybe it's OK if I seem mom-like, as long as I seem professorial at the same time. Maybe the fact that more moms are professors and more professors are moms will come to represent a good thing, not a cause for feelings of discomfort and humiliation by students.

National Stress Foundation

What do you do if one of the program officers at a funding agency to which you send proposals is not as professional, sane, objective, and/or non-hating-of-your-guts as you might wish them be?

How common is this?

I suspect it isn't very common in its most severe form. I can think of maybe 3 colleagues in the past 15-20 years who have had this experience at such a serious level that they had to change their research topics because there was no way they were going to be funded in a certain program by a certain program officer no matter how awesome their proposals.

Even so, I am wondering how common it is for someone writing a proposal to feel some anxiety about the program officer's personal opinion of them, objectivity about certain types or subfields of research, or other aspects that don't strictly involve the "intellectual merit" of the proposed research -- whether or not the anxiety is based on experience or even reality.

There are many things to be anxious about when submitting a proposal. Where does anxiety about program officers rank among them? I refer here specifically to anxiety about program officers, not reviewers or panel members or others who might be in the reviewing chain.

For me, anxiety about program officers has always been extraordinarily low or non-existent, but lately it has shot up to close to the top of the list. I hope this is temporary, and I hope certain program officers are very temporary.

P-Mentoring (2)

Thanks to all who sent email or made comments about postdoc mentoring. Here are some ideas for things to mention and discuss in a postdoc mentoring statement and plan:

- PIs will discuss with postdocs the goals and timelines for conference abstracts, papers, proposals, and things like that. These goals can be somewhat flexible and can be revisited as necessary, but should give the postdoc a clear idea of what they need to aim for.

- The statement can describe existing or planned research group meetings and/or regular individual meetings between the supervisor and postdoc.

- It should be mentioned if postdocs will be involved in project planning and new grant proposals.

- Postdocs can be encouraged to meet with visiting speakers and other visitors (describe the relevant visitor/seminar series).

- Postdocs who are interested should be given mentoring opportunities (e.g., undergrad research students, interns).

- Postdocs who are interested should be given the chance to organize or help organize graduate seminars and perhaps teach (as a visitor/substitute) a few undergraduate classes.

- Postdocs should definitely participate in conferences (with travel funded by the grant) – if possible, they should attend a variety of conferences, ranging from the giant ones to the small focused ones.

- Postdoc mentoring statements can list the various other faculty and researchers whom the postdoc will encounter, thereby showing that the postdoc will have a community of researchers with whom to interact.

- If a university has such things, postdocs can participate in workshops or courses designed to prepare them for academic and other jobs.

- Postdocs can be encouraged to participate in national workshops focused on academic or other careers.

- Postdocs should be given information about various resources related to careers; e.g., for academic careers, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

- Once a proposal is funded, the postdoc can participate in creating a more individualized plan for their mentoring.

- Postdocs who are entirely unproductive and publish nothing despite being given ample funding, opportunities, and time should pay back all the money they have taken from a PI's grant. Actually, I just made that up to see if anyone was still reading.


I don't think any of that would result in a dramatic change in how I do things, but it's helpful to see it written out and to contemplate the possibilities.

I'm not sure how NSF will evaluate the plans. My experience with the Broader Impacts component of proposals has been that reviews are extremely inconsistent. It is also likely that mentoring statements will be taken more seriously by some programs than by others.

All I know is that we've got to write these things, we PIs should do what we can to provide an excellent career-launching experience for our postdocs, and that postdocs should in turn take full advantage of the research opportunity with which they've been presented to do great things.

Postdoc Mentoring

When I was a postdoc, I was just happy to get through a day without being groped (by an emeritus professor), excluded from using the research facilities I needed (by technical staff), yelled at (by office staff), unnerved (by a large male grad student who frequently expressed the opinion that 'girls like to be hit'), insulted (by one of a wide range of people), or the target of a scary lab prank (by one particular technician). The concept of 'postdoc mentoring' was not even a gleam in anyone's eye. I did my work and got out of there as soon as I had the opportunity.

That said, during my postdoc I made some lifelong friends, I discovered that I was good at research, and I learned how to keep going in the face of adversity. I dealt not only with the above-listed items but also the possible tanking of a research project owing to a colleague's reneging on part of the research. I was left to fend for myself in terms of research projects, so I used some of my own ideas to create a project, carry it out (in part by traveling to other universities to do the work), and publish it. It was an important experience for me, and I emerged from it angry but confident.

Would my experience have been more positive if my supervisor, an entirely decent if somewhat clueless person, had been required to at least contemplate 'mentoring' me and assisting me with career development skills?

Starting this year, NSF proposals that request funding for postdoctoral researchers must include a statement about how the postdoc(s) will be mentored. For a brief time this mentoring statement was supposed to be part of the body of the proposal, but, perhaps in response to complaints, the postdoc mentoring text is now a supplementary document, up to a page in length. As with the required Broader Impacts component of proposals, NSF is serious about the mentoring statement: proposals that request funding for postdocs but that do not contain the mentoring supplement will not even be reviewed.

The proposal guide lists the following as examples of mentoring activities:

1. training in preparation of grant proposals, publications and presentations;
2. career counseling;
3. guidance on ways to improve teaching and mentoring skills;
4. guidance on how to effectively collaborate with researchers from diverse backgrounds and disciplinary areas;
5. training in responsible professional practices.

I am trying and failing to imagine my own postdoc supervisor giving me guidance on mentoring skills or responsible professional practices, so I think I will move on and consider instead my experience and philosophy as a supervisor of postdocs. How am I doing with respect to the listed items? In fact, I'm not doing so well, although I think overall I am a decent supervisor of postdocs.

Item #1. For me, this is the easiest one to accomplish. It is difficult to imagine a reasonably sane and functioning postdoc in my research group not getting a lot of experience with these activities in the course of a typical postdoc. I certainly work closely with my postdocs on writing papers and preparing presentations, and there's typically a grant proposal in the works that can involve a postdoc interested in such things.

Item #2. I'm not exactly sure what this means but I know that the only career counseling that I do is of the informal, conversational sort. My own experience begins and ends with academia. I can speak at length about academic jobs and how to approach acquiring one at various types and sizes of institutions based on my own experiences in several different countries, but career counseling about industry, government, or other career modes would have to come from someone else. There are, however, workshops and conferences and colleagues with this expertise, but other than pointing these out to my postdocs (who are generally more aware of them than I am), I don't have anything compelling to say about this possible item in a mentoring statement.

Item #3. My postdocs, if they so choose, can supervise or help supervise undergraduate and MS students, but they typically do not teach. Perhaps I am failing to provide my postdocs with the necessary career skills they need to succeed in a faculty position, but those who want teaching experience during their postdoc either participate in some workshops that prepare grad students and postdocs for the various components of a faculty position, or they acquire a visiting assistant professor or lecturer position before or after the postdoc.

In a short (1-2 year) postdoc in particular, there isn't much time to do anything except the research. Most postdocs enjoy having this time to really focus on research. It may be the one time in an academic career (other than the occasional sabbatical) when you are free of taking/teaching courses, taking/giving exams, and doing endless managerial and administrative tasks. On the one hand, research-only experience may not prepare you for a faculty position in which you have to balance teaching - research - service, but it can set you up well for the research component if you start some long-term projects and develop important collaborations that will carry you through the first few crazy years of a faculty position.

Item #4. By this point in the list it is clear that my mentoring skills -- at least according to the items listed by NSF -- are not as organized or complete as they could be. In my opinion, the best way to effectively do item #4 is for the postdoc to work on a research project that involves a diverse group of other scientists. Most of my projects are diverse in terms of disciplines involved, most involve international collaborators, and I suppose I add a splash of diversity as an FSP.

I'm not sure what to do about the word 'guidance' for #4, though. I probably rely too much on the 'lead by example' type of passive 'guidance'. If I saw a problem with how a postdoc interacted with another scientist owing to their being from a different field, country, ethnicity, or gender, I would certainly leap into action, but other than that, most things get figured out just by working together and doing the research. I don't think this philosophy would sound very impressive (or competent) in a postdoc mentoring statement, and it may well be an example of the flawed philosophy that resulted in the need for such statements.

Item #5. Well, there are certainly a lot of opportunities for this at my university. I am required to participate in them from time to time as part of being allowed to be a PI on grants, but I have found every single one of them without exception to be a huge waste of time and largely irrelevant to my experience as a professor of the physical sciences. I would not voluntarily subject my postdocs to these ethics training sessions.

Here again I prefer to lead by example and discuss informally issues related to co-authorship and credit and sharing/stealing ideas and so on, but once again I don't think that would look good in a mentoring statement. I suppose I could still list the possible opportunities for ethics training. Would that be ethical if I had no intention of requiring or even encouraging a postdoc to participate in them?

What else could be on the list for mentoring activities? What do postdocs want? (other than higher salaries, better benefits, and, in some fields, more respect). Perhaps I am lacking in imagination about this because I am currently interacting with extremely happy postdocs. In fact, my postdoctoral supervisory experience has either involved happy, productive and energetic postdocs or deeply dysfunctional insane and/or unproductive postdocs. If mediocre postdocs exist, they have not come to work with me.

I am glad that NSF is taking postdoctoral experiences seriously, not just in terms of the research but in terms of the overall experience of postdocs and at least asking PIs to contemplate career development issues with respect to supervising postdocs. Perhaps just recognizing the importance of these activities is a major first step towards realizing the goal of improving postdoctoral experiences.

That said, I hope that NSF will cut me some slack if I write a rather lame statement and will consider my track record of postdoc supervision.

If any readers have already written one of these postdoc mentoring statements and is willing to share it (or a draft), please send it to me by email and I will post some/all of them. In addition, postdoctoral readers should feel free to add to the official list of NSF items above; what else should it include?